Enfilade

From Le Blog de L’APAHAU:

Charlotte Guichard, La figure de l’amateur au XVIIIe siècle
Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 28 April 2011

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, "Portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet," ca. 1765 ( Louvre)

Traditionnellement associé au collectionneur ou relégué au rang de simple dilettante, l’amateur est en réalité au XVIIIe siècle une figure centrale dans la constitution des savoirs artistiques. A distance de la conception kantienne, le langage du goût renvoie alors à des opérations cognitives dans le monde des amateurs. Non pas désintéressés, mais passionnément liés aux objets, à leur matérialité et à leur ordonnancement, les savoirs de l’amateur sont des savoirs du geste, articulés à un faire et à une praxis. La conférence présentera la spécificité de cette figure et son rôle dans la formation du discours de l’histoire de l’art, à travers l’exemple des « Rymbranesques », ces gravures d’artistes amateurs qui furent un des lieux où se construisit la grandeur de Rembrandt et son intégration dans le canon artistique.

From the Bard Graduate Center:

Susan Taylor-Leduc, The “Pleasures of Surprise” in the French Picturesque Garden
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 27 April 2011

Just as video games, smart phone ‘apps’ and online betting solicit the attention of early 21^st-century subjects, gaming, particularly high-stakes gambling, was irresistible to eighteenth-century French Society. Whereas gambling was considered as an abstract science combining mathematical calculation and chance, its corollary, surprise, inspired the imagination. Baron de Montesquieu linked the two in his “Essay on Taste” in 1754, suggesting how the social practices of gambling inspired surprising images, behaviors, and sensations. Comparing playing cards, board games, engravings, and paintings to garden plans and extant garden sites, this talk investigates how gambling was projected from the card table to the picturesque gardens created by elite patrons who were themselves addicted gamers. It argues that by fostering a game-like sense of surprise, such gardens promoted new sensate experiences that reconfigured eighteenth century notions of amusement and pleasure and contributed to the formulation of modern aesthetic discourses. (more…)

Dena Goodman, ‘Becoming a Man in the Age of Revolutions’
Newberry Library Eighteenth-Century Seminar, Chicago, 9 April 2011, 1-3pm

Professor Dena Goodman seeks to complicate the picture of nineteenth-century reactionary aristocrats and modern republicans by bringing an eighteenth-century perspective to bear on French revolutionary and post-revolutionary culture and society. Her paper will trace the life and career of a boy born less than a decade before the start of the French Revolution and asks how he became a man—and what kind of a man he became—through the successive upheavals of French history, from the Revolution and the Terror through the restoration of the monarchy and the regimes that followed. She argues that he became a “new man” of the nineteenth century only by drawing on family ties and patronage networks deeply embedded in the ancien regime of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The paper for this seminar session will be pre-circulated. Those who plan to attend will be sent the paper via email after they have registered. Advance registration is required for all Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies programs. To register for this seminar, please send an e-mail to: renaissance@newberry.org or call: 312-255-3514. A reception will follow the seminar. For more information about the seminar, please visit our website.

From the Bard Graduate Center:

Mimi Hellman, Forms of Distraction: Towards a Decorative Imagination in Eighteenth-Century France
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 30 March 2011

The eighteenth-century French interior was filled with a multitude of artfully designed objects, from lustrous porcelain vases to intricately veneered furniture to paintings representing the trysts of mythological lovers. Yet sustained appreciation of these works was often difficult due to factors such as location, lighting, and codes of conduct. By exploring the tensions between visual abundance and compromised visibility, this lecture suggests that both designers and consumers imagined the interior as a space where distraction, not attention, shaped the aesthetic and social value of decorative art.

Mimi Hellman is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, where she has taught since 2004. She has also taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Dr. Hellman received her B.A. and M.A. from Smith College, and the Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships including a David E. Finley Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1997-2000), and a research fellowship at the American University in Paris from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation (1995-7).

Dr. Hellman is preparing a book entitled The Hôtel de Soubise: Art and Ambition in Eighteenth-Century France. She has published numerous essays, including “Enchanted Night: Decoration, Sociability, and Visuality after Dark,” in Paris: Life and Luxury (forthcoming in 2011); “The Nature of Artifice: French Porcelain Flowers and the Rhetoric of the Garnish,” in The Cultural Aesthetics of Porcelain in the Eighteenth Century (2010); “Up the River: Touring Sing Sing,” in Lives of the Hudson (2010); “The Decorated Flame: Firedogs and the Tensions of the Hearth,” in Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts, winner of Historians of British Art book prize (2010); “The Joy of Sets: The Uses of Seriality in the French Interior,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past (2006); “Interior Motives: Seduction by Decoration in Eighteenth-Century France,” the introduction to the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalogue, Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century (2006); and “Domesticity Undone: Three Historical Spaces,” in Undomesticated Interiors (2003).

Please RSVP and join us in the Lecture Hall at 38 West 86th Street, between Columbus Ave and Central Park West, at 5:45pm for a reception before the talk. For general information please contact academic-events@bgc.bard.edu.